mission

Affinity is a strong attractor. Knowing that others will look, act, think, talk, or smell like you in a group provides a measure of safety and comfort. This is how most churches begin, and our experience in the past has been no exception. However, the challenge of being a missional community is that all ages, backgrounds, ethnicities, believer and un will be welcome and accepted. Two things (at least) will be true about all these people: none will be perfect and all are loved by God.

So instead of searching for safety and comfort among friends, we must face some daunting questions. How do we love like God loves? How do we respond to brokenness; visible and invisible? How do we become a community of healing, reconciliation, and forgiveness? A lot of Christians never think about these questions on a corporate level. This is the unfortunate consequence of normal church culture.

The water we swim in worships the twin gods of individualism and consumerism. Most people still see the church as a “vendor of religious goods and services”. If that is true, then these are not questions for the average church-goer. They would naturally be taken care of by paid professionals or hard-core volunteers. But in a missional community, everyone has to play*. There is no clergy-laity divide. There are no passive observers. No one is exempt from considering the other.

As a result, we must be prepared for a healthy amount of disagreement over how to practically respond to these questions. Some will debate mercy versus justice. Others will consider unhealthy people a threat to their healthy relational boundaries. Many will wonder, how will I have time to add anything else to my life? These concerns must be named and wrestled with collectively. The alternative is to fall back to the safety net of affinity. Jim Van Yperen says in his book, Making Peace, “If we gather, as the world does, around values of individualism [and consumerism], then we form self-absorbed people whose empty lives demand a constant fight (or flight) for individual rights and needs. But if we gather in authentic community hungering and thirsting for righteousness, we have God’s blessing and filling to grow through our differences.”

In future posts I will continue to explore the makeup of a community that is becoming a loving, healing, restoring, and forgiving community. This is not the formula to quickly grow a church. But there are principles right out of scripture that do grow a healthy church in the long run.

* John Wimber is famous for saying, “Everyone gets to play,” to show that ministry is not restricted to the professionals. I’d like to modify that slightly to “Everyone has to play.” Not in a legalistic sense, but in order to communicate necessity. If the whole of the community isn’t being constantly invited into the process of growing into their gifts and callings, everything I’ve talked about in this post will be severely restricted. There is always room for times of rest and healing. But it is often the case that the weakest has the most powerful gift to offer.

– Only 20% of Americans go to church. The lowest it’s ever been measured in the history of America.
– 8 to 10 thousand churches will shut their doors in next 12 months, never to reopen.
– America is now the most religiously diverse nation in the world.
– America is now the 3rd largest mission field in the world.
-150,000 people per week are leaving the church(Source: Hartford Institute)

These are staggering statistics.

One of the goals of Resurrection Church is to help shift the church away from just trying to attract people to come to a Sunday morning service. It’s important to acknowledge this is difficult. Yet I believe if churches continue to hold onto an understanding of church that is focused on attraction, these statistics will only get worse.

We want to connect people in small, organic spiritual families that love and care for one another and do good in the world, popularly known as “Missional Communities”. The idea of missional communities is still new and mostly foreign to people. But the history of the church has been filled with people and movements that have gone back to a simple way of life like Jesus and the disciples practiced and the early church carried forward in the power of the Holy Spirit.

Our dream of seeing a movement of missional communities rise up is exciting, but also intimidating. The temptation is to scale back our dreams and settle for less. This is a side affect of consumerism and how we’ve been influenced by culture. If a ministry doesn’t rapidly look successful, or we face setbacks, we are apt to label it a failure and close it down.

Luke 4:14-30 tells the story of Jesus returning to his hometown right at the beginning of his ministry.

It’s important to realize that at this point, Jesus was alone. He had been traveling around the simple, rural towns in Galilee preaching, healing, and casting out demons. He was drawing crowds, but he didn’t try to coax any of these people to become followers or disciples. He was just announcing and demonstrating the presence of the Kingdom.

In Nazareth, Jesus stood up in the middle of the people who watched him grow up and said, “I’m God’s son. I’m announcing the Kingdom and since this is my hometown, you won’t accept me.” That, of course, didn’t go over too well. The story ends with the townspeople literally trying to push him over a cliff.

It would have been very easy for Jesus to become discouraged at this point. This was his hometown. He reads his “vision statement” right out of the scriptures his family, friends, and neighbors had been reading their whole life. And they reject him…even to the point of wanting to kill him! But this was no surprise and didn’t slow him down. Jesus just continued on with his work among those who had “ears to hear and eyes to see.”

We should not be afraid to announce the Kingdom dream God has given us. If the church culture – our “hometown” – won’t accept us, then we need to go into the “other villages” right around us. There is a huge population of unchurched Christians and others who need family. God will show us the “disciples” to call to follow Jesus along the way.

So we’re not going to stop…we are going to pray, we are going to preach, we are going to heal, cast out demons, and not get discouraged. There is just too much at stake.

I grew up in a church where the belief was, quite literally, Jesus could float down from the clouds unannounced and snatch away us believers. For a young child, this was not good news. First, there was the fear of the unknown. Children need to feel safe, and even though all the images I had been presented with of Jesus were safe (holding lambs, looking serene in a meadow,) the images of returning Jesus felt scary and confusing. (For example, I really hope the artist who painted the image above was either joking or 12.) Also confusing was hearing adults discuss how they couldn’t wait for Jesus to return. As a 40 year old adult, I can appreciate the notion of escaping from the grind of life, but this was incredibly difficult to reconcile as a child. I loved God and hated evil. But I just couldn’t understand why Jesus wanted to take us away from our home and burn it up!

Perhaps you had a similar experience, or still share those beliefs. This is not meant to argue end times theology, but rather to argue that how the end of God’s story is framed has an enormous impact on the Church’s mission now.

Planting a church is a sociological experiment. The society that develops is dependent on the founder’s theology, psychology, personality, politics, and even what could be considered benign personal preferences. But most important to the church’s formation is the story that is told from the beginning. What is the purpose for this new church? Why should it exist and where is it going? The driving force behind the story told should be The story – God’s story – from Genesis to Revelation. This is the foundation for everything a church is and does as God’s people in a place, so having your story straight is pretty important.

God’s story is about redemption, renewal, and ultimately hope. If an atheist were to ask me, “Why do you believe in God?” my answer would be, “Because God’s story has a hopeful ending.” One of the dominate worldviews of our time – scientific rationalism – has only one possible ending: The world is destroyed in a fireball a few billion years from now when the sun burns out…and you won’t be around to see it because you’ll be dead. I can’t debate the science behind that ending. But I can talk about an alternative ending where the returning Jesus brings together heaven and earth in a cosmic act of healing, the dead are raised to new and brighter life, and hope shines out like the newborn sun.

This ending to the story is found in the same scriptures of the floating on clouds Jesus. It doesn’t negate the fact that, yes, Jesus will return – actually reappear – one day. Believe me, when that happens, it will feel like the world is ending. But there is nothing to fear and I think he will find a way to comfort his children. N.T. Wright likens this to seeing a lamppost in a dense fog. You can tell that there is light ahead and just make out the shape of a lamppost, but the surrounding details are fuzzy. The important thing is that God will make things right. He can be trusted.

I hope you can see that it won’t do to sit around waiting for signs of the end. The healing and reconciling mission of God should be the hopeful, passionate pursuit of every follower of Jesus. With this as the foundation, any faith community can truly begin with the end in mind.

This is a great example of everyday mission from my friend Lee Williams who is a missionary with his wife Dori in southern Argentina. Lee and Dori recently moved to Neuquén and are finding ways to build relationships with new friends and neighbors. His story below is a beautiful picture of taking everyday activities that come natural to a culture or place and allow the Holy Spirit to fill them with new meaning and life.

Here in Argentina they have a national habit, or maybe more accurately, an addiction, to a drink called yerba mate. Yerba is the tea-like substance, and mate – pronounced ma-tay – is the small cup usually made out of a gourd, or wood, or ceramic. They drink it like Americans drink coffee – all the time. And when you go to visit people, or when they come to your house, it is expected that sooner or later someone will break out the mate and pass it around. Not that mate is just enjoyed at home. No, you’ll see people driving down the road sucking on the straw (called a bombilla), sitting under a tree, at the office, at the hospital lab…

Sharing mate in the Argentinean culture is a natural invite into conversation about meaningful subjects like Christ and the kingdom (and of course they can degrade into themes like who won last night’s soccer match – a more common topic :). There is one cup, one straw, and one thermos of hot water from which all share. It is a ritual that invites openness and sharing, and we’ve been able to build relationships around the mate with a number of different families in Neuquén. Here you have to always be ready for folks to just stop by, unannounced, to say hello and, of course, pass around the mate. This is a cultural adjustment for us, and one we are gladly embracing. It was not a custom in Peru, and is defiantly against the grain of what we Americans generally consider neighborly propriety.

Some of our richest times thus far have been with another couple, or two, passing around the mate while seated at our kitchen table and sharing our histories, our struggles, and our hopes for what’s to come. This is the place that we believe our most lasting ministry can happen – in a simple arena, as jars of clay, releasing a power that comes not from us but from above. We can impart truth without ourselves being poured out, but that just doesn’t seem the Jesus way. May the Lord use these times of spontaneous communion to shake us from our overdeveloped sense of “personal space” and have our eyes opened to the depth of the riches that belong to us as members of the Body of Christ (Romans 12, I Corinthians 12-14)!